Why the hell isn't Toshiba in there? Nearly every laptop that's 2-to-5 years old has a Toshiba or IBM drive. EVERY Toshiba laptop I've encountered since then has had a bad drive, but that's not the PRIMARY issue. Basically, I Scandisk it and it either passes flawlessly or locks up/reboots the machine. If it passes, that means I SHOULD be able to format and reinstall the OS to fix any other software related problems and if it reboots/locks up, I really have no other choice but to format considering that they don't have a spare-sector repair utility like IBM and Western Digital. EVERY SINGLE ONE of these Toshiba drives have crashed or locked up FORMAT! Usually, I can't even create a new partition after deleting it. That means the drive goes from usable to permanantly unusable just because I attempted to format. The lack of a decent diagnostic and repair utility means that I have no way to prevent this. In fact, I was so paranoid of my new Compaq laptop a while back, that when I sent it in for a different problem I asked them to scan it (They have access to Toshiba's "inside" tools) and sure enough, I got a new Toshiba drive back (With no explanation why!). Then when I sent it in again for a different reason with the drive still seemingly in perfect order (No I'm not beating it up, but I've had to send it in at least 15 times total) they replaced it without me even asking them to scan it, this time with a Hitachi drive. The Hitachi drive is LOUD, slow, and has forced me to make a memory upgrade because the virtual memory paging practically freezes the computer and makes it sound like it's going to die. So far, I've had:
2 IBM 60GXPs failures (You knew this would be here)
1 IBM 10GB failure (Works for 10 mins at a time though)
1 32GB 5400RPM IBM Travelstar failure (Two days only! The display was screwed the day I got it too. Dell sold me a lemon Inspiron 8100!)
1 20GB IBM Travelstar failure (Failed in a week in my first Compaq 1800)
1 18GB IBM Travelstar failure (Failed in my second totally replaced Compaq 1800)
1 13GB IBM Travelstar failure (They replaced 18GB with the wrong drive and it failed before I could send it back!)
2 Toshiba 10GB failures (Well, Compaq replaced them both under mysterious circumstances in my THIRD totally replaced Compaq 1800)
1 Toshiba 1.3GB failure (Actually not mine, but a friend was pissed when he trusted me to format and install Win98 on the artifact and the above happened. Had to FDISK a 1GB drive in four chunks "around the errors" just to boot!)
1 Toshiba 6GB failure (Also not mine, but a coworker was pissed when he trusted me to reinstall Win98 on the artifact and the above happened. Somehow got 98 installed, but new bad sectors keep popping up and it naggs him every time he boots)
1 Hitachi 10GB (Possibly failed, it's making BAD noises now. The latest in my THIRD totally replaced Compaq 1800)
1 Western Digital 6GB failure (Well, I bought it "As is")
1 Western Digital 10GB ATA66 failure
2 Seagate 8GB failures
1 Quantum 30GB
1 Maxtor 6GB
That's a lot of experience with lost GBs!
The only hard drives I have surviving are my used RMA replacement 60GXP (One week old, one more on the way), an 80GB 5400RPM Western Digital drive, and a 5GB Travelstar drive I use as a backup but have only tested to see if it works (SO it really hasn't had the chance to die on me). Perhaps The South just has some invisible magnetic storm problem or something because I *NEVER* abuse hard drives (Can you believe Michael J. Fox slammed that laptop closed like that while it was powered up on Spin City?!). People think I'm nuts because it baby them so much, but as you can tell from my luck, I have to! Perhaps someone is sabataging me because they see how much care I take? Nah.
From my experience with failed drives, I would never buy anything but IBM or Western Digital drives. Despite my near 100% failure with portable IBM drives, they and Western Digital are the only ones that you can *know* for sure if they have problems even when Scandisk lies to you. Nearly all portables have a name-brand manufacturer to take care of it

Yes, that sounds sick but, it is more important than blindly trusting Maxtor/Quantum, Toshiba and Segate past their warantee just because you can't tell that they're going bad. It's too bad Western Digital doesn't make portable drives

Luckily, the old (and slow) IBM drives still have excellent reliability, unlike the 60+GXP series.
Oh, and thorin: This poll has more drives to justify its existance, though still not enough for me
My vote goes to Samsung, but only because Maximum PC agrees that they are the worst drives in history and a post above seems to confirm that. Ironically, the drive I'm borrowing to temporarily boot off of until I get that 10GB IBM replaced is a rebadged 13GB Samsung that my friend has been using since '99 (Included with his old eMachines PC) and it's still running in MY house! Ha ha ha, stupid friend of mine... He should know better! (He subscribes to Max PC and knows that my house is a Hard Drive Black Hole of some kind).